I picked up a copy of Final Fantasy 4 for the Nintendo DS at the weekend - it will be my travelling companion on the train over the next few weeks, and likely late night insomnia partner.
Square Enix have done it again - Final Fantasy 4 looks fantastic, plays well, and perhaps most importantly appears to have a really good story. Unusually for the DS, the game features a lot of voice acting - most of the main characters dialogue is spoken. I’m not sure what kind of capacity DS cartridges have, but it’s impressive - especially given the orchestral soundtrack that runs throughout.
I was a late arrival to the world of Final Fantasy, and role playing games in general. My first taste of them was Final Fantasy 12 on the PS2 - probably one of the finest RPGs on the platform, if not any platform. I was spoiled immediately. The kingdom of Rabanastre became a living, breathing place - with thousands of non player characters and diverse locations.
Having jumped into the Final Fantasy universe at a plateau of sorts, I have had the opportunity to work backwards through the various games to discover where it all started, and see the progression in terms of software development, story, character design, and game mechanics. It’s tremendous.
The DS Final Fantasy games are wonderfully well designed for a touch screen interface, and in most cases would not work anywhere near as well without it. Each game tends to stand on it’s own, with different mechanics, different characters and different styles of presentation. All of the Final Fantasy games have astounding levels of production values compared to other role playing games.
If you had shown Final Fantasy 4 (or Revenant Wings, or Crystal Chronicles) to anybody at the launch of the Nintendo DS, they would have sworn it was faked - that such games could not be built for it.